


Pomp(adour) and Circumstance

by grapehyasynth



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Haircuts, M/M, POV Patrick Brewer, Quarantine, lockdown - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24375724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: They’ve put this off as long as they could. At the beginning of lockdown, David had been all breezy with his “It won’t last long” and “I’ll just style it higher”. As they started to stare down two months of quarantine, however, frantic noises had started to issue from the bathroom each morning as David attempted to wrangle his hair into something approaching his standard pompadour.Or: David (very reluctantly) lets Patrick cut his hair.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 56
Kudos: 294





	Pomp(adour) and Circumstance

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fic I wanted to read more than I wanted to write it, but I ended up writing it. It doesn't feel as full and lovely as I wanted it to, which is maybe undercutting (HA) the fic and maybe I shouldn't have put this in the notes at the top BUT too late now! There is very little in terms of actual discussion of quarantine, lockdowns, pandemic, etc. here because like many of you I come to fic to escape all that. 
> 
> Also yes, I did research for this. Look at me.

“Patrick. Promise me you’ll be careful.” 

Patrick smiles at the back of his husband’s head. “I promise, David.” 

“Patrick-” This time David’s hand shoots out blindly, groping behind him. 

“David! I could’ve taken your finger off.” 

“No you couldn’t have, because you haven’t even sectioned my hair off like Julio does, so if you’ve got the scissors out already-” 

It had been David’s own decision to not do this in front of a mirror - “There are only so many heart attacks a man can sustain in one hour” - so he doesn’t know that the scissors and the clippers are still safely ensconced in the hair-cutting set that arrived in the mail the day before. A row of clips for pulling hair into neatly-controlled sections are attached to the bottom of Patrick’s t-shirt for easy access. He’d been just about to start when, well,  _ David _ . 

“Julio’s not here, David, and I’m the best you’ve got for the foreseeable future.” 

“I just feel like you’re not taking this responsibility seriously.” 

“I take your hair as seriously as I take your trust, David.” 

“Okay, now I  _ know _ you’re mocking me.”

“I’m  _ not  _ mocking you!” He’s  _ mostly _ not mocking David. He just makes it so  _ easy _ . 

They’ve put this off as long as they could. At the beginning of lockdown, David had been all breezy with his “It won’t last long” and “I’ll just style it higher”. As they started to stare down two months of quarantine, however, frantic noises had started to issue from the bathroom each morning as David attempted to wrangle his hair into something approaching his standard pompadour. 

More often than not, he emerges with the front elegantly coiffed back and a thicket of untamed curls hidden behind the swoop, out of David’s mirror-assisted gaze. Patrick, knowing his husband all too well and harboring a secret love for the curls, had said nothing, but Alexis hadn’t been as considerate. On a video call, a quick glance sideways had revealed David’s hair situation, and the subsequent peals of laughter and David’s mortified “ _ Why didn’t you fucking tell me Patrick I look like a fucking cockatoo _ ” had pushed things from amusingly challenging into untenable. 

“If you’ll let me get back to my  _ work _ ?” Patrick asks, tickling the back of David’s ear. 

David’s shoulders, draped with one of their monogrammed towels, scrunch up, but he grumbles a dark “Zoom divorce is a thing now, Patrick” and tips his head back in apparent acquiescence. 

Patrick had been surprised that David doesn’t know how his own hair is cut. He’d had a general idea, but since he’d “ _ never _ presume to be so  _ rash  _ and  _ ill-advised _ ” as to cut his own hair, he’d never bothered to pay attention to the details. He’d also never anticipated a situation in which not only was his stylist in Toronto closed for the foreseeable future, but he also couldn’t even go to Jeanine for a trim. “Which is, like, already a  _ big _ compromise I’d be making,” he’d explained to Patrick over the near-hyperventilation the thought was causing him. “We’ve all seen the damage that woman can do to a perfectly good head of hair.” 

So it fell to Patrick to undertake what felt about as safe as swallowing a flaming sword: giving David a haircut at home. David had insisted - through the fakest smile Patrick’s ever seen - that he could settle for a basic trim and sacrifice the style a bit, but they both knew more than David’s hair was at risk. His mental health, his very sense of self hung in the balance. Because of his  _ hair _ . So yeah, Patrick’s going to fucking tease him a bit. 

“I’m combing the hair into sections now,” he informs David. 

“I’m not a wild animal, Patrick. You don’t have to telegraph your every movement.” 

“Oh, okay. So I shouldn’t tell you that I’m going to start with a clipper length longer than what you’d normally go for, just in case I mess up?” 

David clears his throat over an ungainly squeak. “No,” he forces out. “No, that seems very... responsible. Good... forethought.” 

Patrick grins, his tongue between his teeth as he catches a section of hair at the top of David’s head, like a little mohawk, and clips it together. He should probably tell David the extent of research he’s done. He’s spent hours on WikiHow and Youtube and used Kim Kardashian’s hairdresser’s pompadour tutorial to practice on a doll he’d ordered online (all of which might either put David at ease or give him a conniption). He’s fallen asleep reading about parietal ridges and water-based pomades. He’d blinked at himself in the mirror one morning to find he’d slicked his own hair up and back in a bleary, automatic output from all the research, and that’s when he’d known he was ready. 

“Alright, babe, I think you should put in your earbuds now.”

This had been David’s main contribution to the planning process. “If I can hear what you’re doing, I’ll be imagining all kinds of things. Hair flying everywhere, like a - a - a massacre in my mom’s wig room,” he’d shuddered. He’s got podcasts and audiobooks and playlists of 80s pop queued up on his phone: something for every possible emotion he might feel while “under the blade”, as he keeps insisting on calling this. 

Patrick waits until he can hear the first strains of synthesizer from the earbuds before he turns the clippers on. He presses his fingertips gently to David’s left temple in the form of nonverbal communication they’d agreed upon beforehand. He feels David’s jaw tense, but he holds his head steady as Patrick begins to work. 

He buzzes the sides of David’s head slowly, cutting upwards and ending with a flick of the wrist that he is excessively grateful David can’t see. He’s still not entirely clear why every source insisted this flick was necessary. It makes him feel like a magician-for-hire. 

When he’s done both sides, he switches the length of the blade on the hair clippers to the next shortest, still longer than what David would likely get done at a professional salon. He repeats the same paths, starting at the temple and cutting up, working his way around the head, but stopping about halfway up what he’d cut before, producing a sort of tiered effect. Showers of jet-black hair flutter down the back of David’s neck, across the towel on his shoulders, onto Patrick’s socked feet. 

Patrick has cut hair before. He’s shaved his friend’s heads for charity events and administered bowl cuts contracted in dares and even helped dye hair when the whole hockey team got blonde tips ahead of a big tournament. He has a vague memory of his dad letting him give him a trim when they were on a two-week-long family road trip across Canada; he’d been maybe five, and his mom had guided his wrist gently, and when he’d seen the pictures recently, the back of his dad’s head looked like it had been attacked by a snapping turtle with a short attention span. 

He’s never cut hair that means this much. He thinks that might be why he hasn’t told David just how seriously he takes this. They’re married, they’re going through isolation together, they share everything - but somehow, letting on that he cried in the backyard when he called his mom to tell her that he was going to cut David’s hair... it feels too big. Like another one of those inconsequential moments that suddenly feel like admission into a secret, special club. It’s a weird kind of intimacy, and he knows David’s only consenting to it under duress. But Patrick’s got a husband who’s particular about his hair, who spends more on product each month than Patrick does in a year, and now his husband is sitting here, on their back porch, trembling a little but letting Patrick in on the process. 

Acknowledging to David how much work he’s put into preparing will mean revealing how badly he wants to do this well. David would tease him for being competitive and perfectionist, but he also expects David would see right through him. Would gather him close and kiss his cheek and make him feel excruciatingly, terrifyingly, exquisitely seen. 

After he’s wet the hair at the top of David’s head and trimmed the sides with the scissors, Patrick hesitates. He has to cut the hair that will turn into the height of the pompadour, and if he leaves it too long it’ll turn into a weird Flock of Seagulls situation, but too short and David won’t be able to do anything with it. He’d fallen into a deep trail of Jonathan Van Ness videos about point cuts, so he knows the technique, in  _ theory,  _ but everything he’s ever heard about haircutters and barbers is  _ she took off more than I wanted _ . If the  _ professionals _ can’t estimate the length right, how can  _ he _ ? 

“Everything okay back there?” David asks loudly. 

Patrick smiles and kneads David’s shoulder reassuringly. He leans over to pull out one earbud and says, “Just thinking about what to request when it’s _ your  _ turn to cut  _ my _ hair.” 

“Okay-” David begins, but Patrick puts the earbud back in and tugs on the hair nearest David’s forehead, effectively silencing him. 

As soon as he starts trimming, he gets it. He gets why haircutters take off too much. Go a little too far in any one direction, or feel the slightest bit dissatisfied with the evenness of the cut, and you fall into the trap of  _ maybe just a bit more _ . Now that he’s caught on to this temptation, he turns, a wide stretch of hair still caught between two fingers, and finds one of the discarded sectioning clips. He uses it to mark off a point at which he absolutely must stop cutting. 

It’s a technique he’s applied in other areas of his life: setting a benchmark, some sign to say, “If you reach this point, if you put in this many hours or write this many pages or read this many essays, it’s time to stop.” A technique picked up from his mom, a hard-stop for the perfectionist tendencies in their family. People always look at him and at David and say something about opposites attracting, but when it comes to wanting things to be perfect, they’re competitively similar. 

Before he’s really ready for it, he’s cleaned up the edges and David’s hair is ready for styling. 

David had said he could do this part, “I know it’s a bit more, well, artsy and creative,” but he’d backed down as soon as Patrick had admitted, “No, I, I’d- I’d like to try it.” 

He’d looked at Patrick like he sometimes does, like he sees right through him, and he’d nodded several times. “Okay,” he’d consented. “We’ll just do it on a day when we don’t have to go to the grocery store, or make any video calls, so that if you really mess it up-” Patrick had tackled him backwards onto the couch and kissed some faith into him. 

He slicks the hair with pomade, teasing David’s scalp a bit as he goes. David’s head lolls willingly along, following Patrick’s touch like a magnet. After he’s cleaned his hands, Patrick arms himself with a blow dryer in one hand and a curling brush in the other and begins teasing the hair into its wave. 

He starts the process still standing behind David, but he can’t get a good sense of the full visual effect, so he comes around to stand in front of him instead. David looks up at him with a small smile, looking much more relaxed than he had when they’d started all this, and oh, that sends a funny rush of warmth up Patrick’s spine. He sways forward and David presses his hands to Patrick’s hips, supporting him as he leans over and keeps curling the hair in long arcs, bringing it up to its full gravity-defying promontory. A hairstyle worthy of such a man. 

“You look very serious,” David comments fondly, about two decibels louder than necessary, over the music. 

Patrick’s lips twitch. This is so much better than standing behind David, staring at an anonymous head. The skin of his face tingles with warmth as David looks at him. A weaker man would throw the brush aside and just sit down in his husband’s lap. 

“There,” Patrick says reverently, a moment later, then remembers. He sets his tools down and taps David on the cheek, nodding at David’s raised eyebrows. David pauses the music and gingerly takes out the earbuds. “All done.” 

David carefully lifts the towel from his shoulders, folding it inwards to contain the hair. He’ll shake it out outside later, for the birds, which Patrick finds  _ unbearably _ cute. “Thank you, honey,” David murmurs, setting the towel on the chair and winding his arms around Patrick’s shoulders. 

“Don’t you want to look at it before you thank me?” Patrick grins. 

“Mm. Nope,” David whispers, kissing Patrick’s lips twice, quickly. “I trust you.” 

“You’re too scared to look, aren’t you.” 

“Um, that wouldn’t-” David laughs, a little too high, and shakes his head. “That would make me a terrible husband. I’m sure you did a  _ grand _ job.” 

“Oh, you are? Then you don’t mind if I take a picture? I’m thinking about setting up a webpage so I can offer haircuts once all of this is over-” 

“No pictures!” David screeches, batting Patrick’s phone out of his hand and making a break for the bathroom. “No one can see me like-” 

In the echoing silence that follows, Patrick can admit the anticipation has his heart up in his throat. That  _ may _ have more to do with the fact that they’ve had precious little excitement in their lives during the last few months of quarantine, but he also just - he wants David to like it. 

He’s frowning at the floor, considering going to fetch the dustpan and brush and wondering what kind of cheese-and-carbs based dinner would appease David the most, when the husband in question saunters back out of the bathroom. There’s no other way to describe the way he moves. It’s a proud, half-dance of a walk that Patrick realizes has been missing the last couple of weeks. 

“Well,” David says, voice low and emotional. “This is- it looks-”

“Is it okay?” Patrick asks nervously. 

“Is it  _ okay _ -” David’s surrounding him again before he realizes it, pressed to him even though Patrick’s sweaty from the humid afternoon and the tension of the last hour. David kisses him deeply and ruffles Patrick’s own curls. “Yes, Patrick. It’s okay. It’s - I mean, you’re no Julio,” he huffs out in an obvious side-step of earnestness. “But- thank you. I feel more - I feel like - I didn’t realize how much I needed this.” 

Patrick kisses him with understanding. “I told you, I take your hair as seriously as I take your trust,” he avows. 

“Thank you,” David repeats, a precious whisper. “But if you ever tell anyone my hair is full of pomade instead of secrets, I  _ will _ have to revisit that Zoom divorce thing.” 

“Your secrets are safe with me.” 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Kim Kardashian's hairstylist did indeed share tips for cutting and styling a pompadour.


End file.
